@peekay123. For my use case (low power and accurate short distance measurement) they are ideal. I’m currently using one of the Sharp IR distance sensors. Just found a 3V version (been using a 5V version). It’s all good but they don’t do a good job at really short distances and their power consumption is a bit higher than these. Also these sensors require minimal additional components, so the cost if one made them oneself would be extremely low, as compared to the Sharp ones.

Ok, so once you get your hands on one of those between you and @ScruffR, we could have a port!

Also wondering if they could work in the Mailbox to sense when mail has been put in or when the mail door has been opened.

They’ll definitely work in a “standard” US mailbox since it’s dark in there and the length on the mailbox is well within the range. If you put the sensor towards the top, you could potentially tell if there is mail in the box or empty, provided of course that the mail is placed in line with the sensor. You could have two sensors (not sure how to change the I2C address.

Sweet. I’m going to have to try to figure out how the interrupt works in the lower power modes. I don’t want to wake up the Photon or Electron unless the measurement is has a significant difference between the previous reading.

But since this function will only work against the default address 0x29 you need to power up the sensors one by one, reassigning the address before powering up the next one which will again start off with the default address.

I’ve released a v0.0.2 (which again I can’t see) that should correct some error from the original lib with the readReg32Bit() function and other 16 vs. 32 bit adaptions.
If you are using the lib, you may want to remove 0.0.1 and reimport 0.0.2.

Since the Pololu library does lack some features (e.g. ranging interrupt triggers) I’m now porting the Adafruit library too.
This already builds with CLI & Dev, but for Build I’d need to rearrange the file structure.GitHub

I haven’t dug into the library code, and since you’re deep in it, I thought I’d ask you…Does the Pololu library or the Adafruit library support Timed Ranging? And further do either of the libraries support setting (and retrieving) the Ranging Profiles?

From the Datasheet

There are 4 different ranging profiles available via API example code. Customers can create their own ranging profile dependent on their use case performance requirements. For more details please refer to the VL53L0X API User Manual.

If you refer with “Timed Ranging” to “Continous Mode Ranging” with a definable delay between range cycles, then yes - both libraries do.
In the Pololu one there is a Continous.ino that shows a back to back ranging and the comment in there suggests to provide the delay in milliseconds if you don’t want max speed back to back ranging.

For the Adafruit library I’m still struggling with getting it up on Build, so I haven’t had chance to test it properly - but since that’s the “full” (as far as can see) API set provided by STM, there is no doubt it’s supported there too.

For the latter question about the ranging profiles, it’s possible with both, but only the Adafruit one has a dedicated API while Pololu has stripped away a lot of the complex APIs (for ease of standard use) and you’d need to set and read registers “manually”.

Since the Pololu library does lack some features (e.g. ranging interrupt triggers) I’m now porting the Adafruit library too.

Sweet!

I have 2 of these sensors coming Monday and I’m wanting and hoping I can use them to trigger their interrupt pin to wake a Photon or Electron when something passes in front of the sensor past a predefined distance.

You should be able to set a threshold distance and can set the interrupt to either trigger when a reading is closer than that (e.g. intrusion alarm) or when the reading is further away (e.g. lost contact to object).